May 16, 2017

Trump movement needs institutional analysis, not focus on individuals

Now that the American people have actually gotten their candidate into the White House, he is no longer in a battle against various individuals and personalities like he was during the electoral season -- Trump vs. Cruz, Trump vs. Clinton, Trump vs. Jorge Ramos, etc.

He is up against very powerful groups that persist over time despite the comings and goings of particular individuals within their membership. The goals of these groups, and the leverage they wield in order to get their way, likewise persist over time regardless of internal composition at any given time.

Even during the electoral season, it was not as though the battles against Cruz, Rubio, Romney, McCain, et al were separate battles -- they were interchangeable representatives from the GOP Establishment. Taking on Clinton, Obama, Biden, et al -- taking on the Democrat Establishment. And not Jorge Ramos, Anderson Cooper, Joe Scarborough et al -- taking on the media.

And now, the nature of the battles is not winning the appeal to average American citizens, who choose the winning side -- as determined by relative success at gaining social media followers, driving ratings for a debate, topping opinion polls, and ultimately prevailing at the ballot box. Trump blew his competitors out of the water when the battle was for popular appeal.

In office, he is fighting an entirely different sort of battle -- to pass legislation, to get nominees into their positions, to re-negotiate trade deals, to build the wall, and so on. He's already won the popular argument on these topics -- now he has to try to get them done, against the actions of opposing groups wielding leverage that they did not have before when trying to persuade the public (e.g., holding up a nomination in a Senate committee).

Now it is war, and war is a collective affair. There are no individuals, and no personalities -- everyone is a representative of a group (or multiple groups), trying to advance the goals of that group, using the leverage that that group has to wield. In trying to figure out what is going on, it won't do to point to some individual and their personal motives -- if that's all there is, it's just petty personal BS that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Instead, we must identify what group that person represents, what that group's goals are, and what leverage that group has to get its way.

For example, an earlier post looked at how the Democrats have become the party of Wall Street (and the media), with Republicans becoming the party of the Pentagon (and resource extraction industries).

Perhaps the most devastating psy-op that the Deep State has run against the Alt-Right was to implant the idea that Jared Kushner had begun to sabotage the President's agenda, against a more loyal individual like Steve Bannon (in reality, the two are Trumpists). This hysteria culminated in a #FireKushner hashtag trending on Twitter for an entire evening. Whoever was in charge of that psy-op was rewarded very handsomely for identifying the paranoid tendency within a subset of the Right, and figuring out who was obsessed with individuals rather than interest groups. Only such an audience would buy such a story.

In their imagination, Kushner has special power on account of being the President's son-in-law, and through his allegedly highly influential daughter Ivanka, who also enjoys power via nepotism (another successful piece of Deep State psy-ops). Steve Bannon, in this story, only enjoyed the level of power that an ideological fellow traveler would receive -- far below what a kinsman would receive. So, nepotism won out, and given the liberal New Yorker nature of Jared and Ivanka, plus perhaps some sprinkling in of "Jared is (half-)Jewish," that's why things were going wrong.

Back on Planet Earth, Jared and Ivanka wield no power whatsoever because they do not represent any interest group -- something that might carry the adjective "Big," like Big banks, Big agriculture, Big military, and so on. They are therefore advancing no group's agenda, and they are not wielding any leverage over the President that derives from membership in that group.

It is pure fantasy to think that Ivanka was the one who convinced her father to bomb Syria just because some false flag propaganda tugged at her womanish heart-strings. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is an established institution that seeks to administer a global empire by force (or threat), and is determined to punish those nations that reject becoming its clients, such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. Its leverage consists in its control over the armed forces. Having the military brass lined up against you is just slightly more persuasive than having to listen to your tearful daughter complain about a mean old man.

Moreover, Ivanka only asked for the bombing (in the story -- probably she was coerced by the Pentagon into putting up a sad tweet to advance their cause). She did not ask for the reversal of policy from anti-regime change to pro-regime change. That was the real outcome, with the bombing only serving as a spectacle to announce that the military was veto-ing Trump and his team's message from just a week ago ("Assad's fate will be left up to the Syrian people").

Michael Flynn was not just some individual who withheld information from the VP, for which he was fired. He represented an interest group within the military -- evidently not a very powerful faction -- that wants to turn away from dead Cold War obsessions and re-orient toward fighting radical Islam. For challenging the Pentagon's Cold Warrior-ism consensus, he was kicked out when the Pentagon leveraged its connections with Deep State to fabricate a scandal about Trump/Russia. A representative of the Pentagon consensus, H.R. McMaster, was put into his place -- and if McMaster ever leaves, that does not mean anything if his replacement is yet another representative of the Pentagon consensus.

Mike Pence did not get the running mate slot because he personally was going to help win the election, since elections never hinge on the running mate (let alone on personalities rather than issues). Rather, he was a representative of the GOP Establishment and was sent to advance that group's goal of not letting Trump have free rein over personnel. Likewise, Reince Priebus was not personally the best person for the job of Chief of Staff -- he is part of the GOP Establishment, sent to advance its interests within the White House.

What leverage does the RNC have? Well, remember back when Priebus was regularly threatening to stage a contested convention, even though it was obvious Trump was going to win more than enough delegates? That's a very real threat that they, as the leaders of the Party whose nomination Trump was seeking, could follow through on. Somehow that plan never materialized. However, they clearly had enough leverage to get several key personnel picks in return for not staging a contested convention -- the running mate, and conditional on Trump's winning the election, a few Cabinet picks (whether left open or specified to be Chief of Staff, Press Secretary, etc.).

As with any potential successor to Pentagon boarding party member McMaster, any shake-up in the White House that ousts Priebus and Spicer will not change things if their replacements are other representatives of the GOP Establishment. That remains a possibility, with the leverage being that the RNC will coordinate with GOP Congressmen to really sabotage Trump regarding legislation, appointments, not attacking Dems who call for impeachment, and so on.

I think the Right is going to have a hard time shifting frame because they tend to be more socially oriented and grounded in reality, whereas interest groups are a more abstracted from concrete individuals and lack personality and juicy drama. Brain scan studies show that liberals and Leftists are more analytical, and conservatives and Rightists more emotional.

I'd look more to Trump supporters who identify as Independents for good analysis, as well as Leftists who focus on economics and politics rather than SJW social-cultural BS. The (Old) Left will call Trump names, assume uncharitable things about his personality, etc., but that can be stripped away from their group-level analysis of the balance of forces among various interest groups, which one has which type of leverage, and so on.

Of course, the cognitive dissonance stemming from their unexpected loss has made the Democrat mainstream devolve into its own individual-level conspiracy theorizing, e.g. painting Bannon as a Svengali rather than a representative from the populist-nationalist faction within the conservative media group. If Bannon were out, and the balance of forces remained, someone else representing the same interests (build wall, re-industrialize economy) would take his place, wielding the same leverage (inflame electoral base via conservatives in media).

Not to mention the retarded conspiracy theories about Putin and Trump. The mainstream Left has nothing to offer anybody.

But we ourselves need to keep our eyes on group-level dynamics, lest we turn into mirror-images of the loony Left. That applies to our electoral goals as well, but that's a topic for another post.

Briefly, though, Trump supporters or Tea Party people are obsessed with primarying their arch-nemesis McCain, specifically, even though he's an incumbent since forever who represents very powerful groups and lobbies (like the Saudis). If the goal is to stack the Senate with more Trump-friendly Republicans, why take on a difficult enemy when the same investment could replace four or five Establishment Republicans who are freshman Senators with little brand recognition and no loyal following? Those people should have tried to primary Rob Portman from Ohio instead, but he sailed through untargeted while all the attention was on McCain's primary.

In short, don't obsess over the interpersonal drama among individual personalities. For the Trump movement, politics is not just some theatrical performance that we want a more entertaining version of, after the boring or depressing versions we've seen so far. We want real-world outcomes to change. For that, we need to identify which groups are on our side, and how to use their distinctive leverage to our advantage, and which groups oppose us, and how to adapt to their leverage. And then, how to grow our side, knowing which groups support us, and how to shrink or neuter the other side, knowing which groups support them.

22 comments:

Phenomenal post, Ag! Always count on Ag to keep the focus (hugs). It's heartening to have my intuition, and I suspect most people's, at least those who frequent Steve Sailer and Ron Unz, confirmed re: Kushner. That the comments sections were being inundated with trolls running this psyops was obvious. Good Lord, they couldn't even help throwing in we and Trump had been "CUCKED!". Yeah, that's not some journo/pundit/DC pundit who's been bullycided on twitter, lol!

"If the goal is to stack the Senate with more Trump-friendly Republicans, why take on a difficult enemy when the same investment could replace four or five Establishment Republicans who are freshman Senators with little brand recognition and no loyal following?"

Primarying Ben Sasse would be much more effective than taking out McCain. I assume McCain will have to retire soon anyways. Sasse has clearly positioned himself as the heir to McCain. If he is taken out one term in, that sends a clear message that being a Neocon lapdog will no longer be an acceptable career path.

On working with allies: Yes, we have to reunite with the Boomers, alt-Right, alt-Lite. Can't afford division. And now more than ever go after the Lefties Ag mentioned. Since the Media wing is so preoccupied with psyops to perform basic function of reporting news, exploiting meat-and-potato populism news and action is just one thing off the top of my head.

Going back to Seth Rich, I want to emphasize Julian Assange hasn't said anything and we shouldn't say it for him. He doesn't have a rep or history of cynicism at all which is why we should take what he has actually said seriously.

And throwing in "the Jews" too much. "See how Jared's staring down Bannon in the situation room -- cucked by the Jews again!"

On the positive side, I've noticed that the Alt-Right is more willing to take criticism for getting duped, and adapt their defenses accordingly, rather than double down in paranoia a la the '90s Cultural Right.

There was decent awareness that they'd gotten duped on the #FireKushner thing. And now they're following Cernovich and Posobiec on Twitter, who keep them grounded in reality regarding which individuals are doing what.

"The Jews" is another way that paranoia gets co-opted and analysis misdirected. It is a group-level view, but it doesn't identify what leverage the Jews have in virtue of being Jews to advance their ethnocentric interests (which are real, just as every group is ethnocentric).

Whatever leverage Jews have is in virtue of being the elite of an actual power group, like Wall Street, Hollywood, the media, etc. Anybody who is high-up in those groups is advancing an anti-American agenda, whether they're Jewish or not. You don't rise to the top of an international globalist organization if you have America's interests foremost.

Ditto re the Israeli tail wagging the goy dog. Israel has essentially no leverage over us, while the Saudis control all that oil. Saudis also have more regional influence (ownership over Mecca and Medina, spreading Salafi mosques), whereas nobody else in the M-E does the bidding of Israel, who they want to see go back to Europe.

Jews as a group are pushy, annoying, and ethnocentric, just like most ethnic groups. Making a serious rather than ironic argument about them having special leverage over us in virtue of being Jewish per se, is to lose focus and come up with the wrong solutions. Look how Germany turned out in getting over-run with foreigners, mass media degeneracy, and globalist banks and political institutions, despite killing off 6 million Jews, if they were the main problem.

Misdirected views will also strike normal people as weird and bogus -- otherwise it would be easy to redpill normies about the JQ. In contrast, everyone understands who Wall Street is, who the Pentagon is, who the media, the oil companies, the education system, and the churches all are.

"Whoever was in charge of that psy-op was rewarded very handsomely for identifying the paranoid tendency within a subset of the Right"

A lot of those people I believe are probably descended from nomadic pastoralists. So rather than being more cooperative with outgroups, they are more introverted, paranoid, and mentally intense. Some of the same people who are stockpiling food in case the economy collapses.

Though the nomadic pastoralists are probably only the extreme, conservatives in general are probably more paranoid because on average they pay more attention to every little thing("What's that supposed to mean???")

Fox is reporting they have law enforcement sources who say Seth Rich made contact with the late Gavin MacFadyen, an Assange associate who was living in London at the time. This immediately jogged something: a despondent man in December 2016 with a British-type name who went way out on a limb to tell people it wasn't Russians, but "disgusted Democratic whistleblowers" and that he personally received them. Was it Gavin? No, it was Craig Murray, a Brit and Assange associate:

"Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and associate of Julian Assange, told the Dailymail.com he flew to Washington, D.C. for emailsHe claims he had a clandestine hand-off in a wooded area near American University with one of the email sources The leakers' motivation was 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the 'tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders'Murray says: 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks''Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that,' Murray insists"

Also, a search of Gavin MacFadyen and Craig Murray show a long relationship irrespective of Julian Assange (ignore recent entries)https://www.google.com/search?q=craign+murray+gavin+macfadyen&rlz=1C1LENN_enUS664US674&oq=craign+murray+gavin+macfadyen&aqs=chrome..69i57.4469j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=craig+murray+gavin+macfadyen

What do we have in terms of actual evidence that Jared Kushner is ideologically a "Trumpist?"

Yes, we generally do need more of this kind of institutional level analysis, but I don't think you can force this framework on every single individual in the administration.

As you've said, Trump is a true outsider in Washington - he represents none of the powerful entrenched interest groups.

Bannon is effectively in the same boat because the nationalist/populist movement is not an entrenched power group in Washington. In fact, it has effectively no power in Washington. Steve Bannon is as much an outsider there as Trump. There's not going to be another Bannon stepping up from the ranks if Trump or the GOP/Pentagon ultimately gets rid of him, because he only got where he is by way of accompanying Trump, and Trump unfortunately only ended up bringing a very shallow pool of nationalists with him.

Same for Jeff Sessions. Like Trump, Sessions is another traitor to his own class (in this case, entrenched GOP politician). Where exactly is Trump going to find another Jeff Sessions?

Analyzing institutions is critical but we can't simply choose to ignore any analysis of individuals as well.

In the end, our real problem is that we have a handful of individuals (Trump, Sessions, Bannon, Flynn) who are trying to fight entire institutions.

And yes, while maintaining our asabiyyah is obviously crucial since the loyalty of the masses is one of the only cards Trump has up his sleeve, you would have still have your work cut out for you trying to convince me that Kushner is one of those individuals who supports any meaningfully good part of the Trump agenda (as in cutting down on immigration, outsourcing, and imperial wars, not stuff like like cutting the capital gains tax).

I'll grant you his personal loyalty to President Trump (of course, Rasputin was also loyal to the czar). But on an individual level, no action of his points toward a sincere belief in populism or nationalism, and on an institutional level, the interest group Kushner best represents is New York business elites, aka Wall Street, one of our two great enemies at the moment.

And speaking of Rasputin, one of the principal means by which the loyal followers of any leader can criticize the actions of that leader without losing faith in the leader himself is by redirecting their frustrations against his advisors. "The Tsar's government is failing, but we know the Tsar is a good man. It's that wicked Rasputin who is leading him astray..."

There are many anecdotes from the time of the Terror under Stalin to the effect of someone who is being out of their home at night by the NKVD telling the policemen "You would be in so much trouble with Comrade Stalin if he knew about this!"

I was not just a participant in the #FireKushner tag, but one of its ringleaders. I am in the DM groups where the influential Trump accounts (not the e-stars like Cernovich, Posobiec, etc. but the ordinary accounts with thousands or tens of thousands of followers) get together and coordinate on what hashtags we are going to trend (no, I do not exaggerate this, I have screencaps where we're pitching ideas back and forth and then two hours later one that we've just come up with in there is #1 in the US).

And I can tell you that I and most of the others in those groups have zero regrets about #FireKushner and would do it all over again in a heartbeat if we had the opportunity to replay the event.

#FireKushner generated page after page after page of news headlines - far more than say, Richard Spencer's in-real life anti-war protest at the capital, or any other in-real life protests against it....

In fact, you can bet Trump probably never even heard about Richard Spencer protesting the war in Syria - but we know damn well that Trump must have seen #FireKushner.

What message did it send? That the base is deeply pissed off about even the slightest aggressive move against Assad and Russia (which, in the end, is all this ended up amounting to, on a tactical level).

Every single elite group that is aligned against the Trump agenda fell over itself praising his action on Syria, but Trump's most loyal followers were frothing at the mouth over it - or so it appeared.

In fact, as we saw afterwards, there was no collapse of support for Trump in the polls - Trump's people are in fact sticking by him. That's the beauty of #FireKushner - it allows Trump's people to protest Trump's actions in the strongest possible terms without disowning Trump himself.

It was in fact a very calculated display of outrage, not a bunch of autistic screeching, or a D&C operation by our enemies. I know this because I am part of the group that calculated it.

#FireKushner was not even an Alt-Right operation per se. These groups I spoke about (our war rooms) are about 35% alt right to 65% normal Trump followers on Twitter (these groups did start out about 10% alt right to 90% normie, however; the ideology is spreading faster than you would ever imagine).

#FireKushner was as grassroots as it gets - it wasn't done at the behest of Richard Spencer or the Daily Stormer, or Cerno and Breitbart, and it didn't even come out of one of the chans. It was regular users on Twitter - guys with 9-5 jobs, soccer moms, and college students - who conceived and coordinated the push that sent it #1.

The idea that this was some kind of planned subversion by CTR or some other enemy media trolls, by the way, is far more damaging to the cohesion of the Trump movement than attacking Kushner or the Syria strike.

Plant the idea that a large bloc of our movement is enemy infiltrators, and you've suddenly made it impossible to maintain trust within the movement - every difference of opinions will get reinterpreted through the lens of whether the opposing side is an enemy infiltrator or not.

And it all goes one way too - Bill Mitchell and his followers are saying those who broke with Trump on Syria are the "fake base" planted by the enemy, but you don't see anyone on the other side calling Bill Mitchell a secret Democratic operative. Lots of other mean things, sure, but not that one.

This idea of infiltration needs to be counter-signaled in the strongest possible terms - you clearly recognize the damage it can do when it's the alt-right overreaching with the "j00z! j00z everywhere!" paranoia, but the more moderate end of the Right is just as capable of this and it can be just as, if not more damaging - recall how a large bloc of now-faithful Trump supporters were once Cruz followers who were gaslit by the likes of Beck and his ilk that Trump was a secret Hillary agent).

Yes, there are of course those in the alt-right who've taken the whole thing too far ("drumpf is a jew, burn it all down, acclerationism now"). They do make a lot of noise, but as we've seen, there's been no substantial dent in Trump's polls and support on their part. 90% of them will jump back on board the minute (God willing) there is forward progress on building the Wall.

And in fairness, you must keep in mind who the alt-right is, demographically speaking. One of the salient factors is that we're all young - most of us are in our 20s and 30s, and we have more teenagers than boomers.

Young people are hotheaded, impatient, and zealous. That's just the way we are. None of us are really political insiders with a lot of practical experience in the workings of government, a lot of us in fact never took much interest in national politics until the rise of Trump began (or just criticized the ruling powers while seeing no real hope of overturning them).

So yes, the alt-right is going to volatile and prone to sudden and extreme mood swings - our movement is the sum of its individual members, and most of those members are impetuous young people. Trying to force a more disciplined mindset is bound to fail by any means short of creating a centralized hierarchy - which would make it far, far easier for our enemies to actually destroy us at this point (we are a guerrilla political movement, we'd be making the same mistake ISIS did).

Do not write off the alt-right just because it is dissing Trump at the moment. Alt-righters are no doubt the most volatile wing of the Trump coalition (at times, the most audacious and most productive, at others, the most shortsighted and easily demoralized), but they are also the most zealous believers in the ideology of nationalism and populism. They'll be there again for Trump the minute he achieves a breakthrough on the agenda that got him elected.

And one more reason to be optimistic - the alt-right will be maturing politically as it does so physically. And since recruitment among young people continues to soar, in the next 10-20 years we should be looking at a movement that can draw on both the energy of the young and the maturity of the old.

So zero apologies or regrets for #FireKushner. I'll debate you any time for as long as you want on why it was the right thing to do. It was a loud and clear signal that Trump could not have possibly missed with the amount of coverage it received - do not take your base of support for granted. At the end of the day, Trump will need to fight, tooth and nail, for every last scrap of change we elected him to make. And from what we know about him and his personality, when his back is up against the wall, he will fight. But it's up to us to put that wall up behind him. We cannot give him infinite space to backpedal.

Side note, or rather to take this all back where it began, Charles Lighthizer, Trump's last confirmed appointee (as Trade Representative) looks to be one of the most promising individuals (or rather representative of an interest group, in this case trade representatives who actually believe in driving a hard bargain) that no one has heard of.

Lighthizer's appointment looks very hopeful for the future of the trade revisionism agenda, and it ought to be played up in order to restore some morale among the troops.

The idea that Kushner was in favor of attacking Syria was a psy-op planted by McMaster, working on behalf of the Pentagon, through his media contacts, organized by Petraeus' PR firm, funded by a Saudi (not Israeli or Jewish) media budget.

The plan was to sow division between Kushner and Bannon, both of whom opposed the Pentagon's push for a ground war in Syria or even initial airstrikes. Or rather, to sow division among Trump supporters who were goaded into hating Kushner and loving Bannon, while ignoring McMaster and the Pentagon boarding party he represents.

The psy-op was a fantastic success. I don't care who came up with some hashtag -- the Pentagon put the narrative out there about "Kushner vs. Bannon on Syria (McMaster invisible)" and you guys swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Accept it, learn from it, and be better prepared for the next psy-op they attempt.

Cernovich reported on this at the time and since. He has proven to have truthful sources in the White House and other NatSec agencies -- you guys on Twitter, and we in blogland, do not.

"McMaster’s friends in the media, as part of a broader strategy to increase McMaster’s power, have claimed Jared Kushner and Bannon had a major falling out. In fact Kushner and Bannon are united in their opposition to McMaster’s plan [for ground war in Syria]." (Apr 9)

"Using a hefty Saudi media budget, Petraeus has been seeding fake news story about alleged drama between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Bannon. In truth, Kusher and Bannon are fighting no more than anyone who wants the ear of the President of the United States fights.

"The real conflict is between McMaster and Bannon-Kusher. Despite media claims to the contrary, Kushner does not want Trump ordering ground troops into the Middle East." (Apr 13)

So what message did you send, assuming Trump got wind of the #FireKushner hashtag? Trump knows that Kushner is against a war in Syria, along with Bannon. He knows there's no feud between them -- he said so himself, after the phony reports wouldn't stop about the alleged Kushner-Bannon feud. So he assumes you guys were either clueless, crazy, or duped by fake news.

To evade the next Pentagon or CIA psy-op, focus less on individual personalities and more on institutional strengths. That would have told you that Kushner, a nobody in DC power groups, was in no position to influence policy at so high a level on such a crucial matter -- war in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and its representatives -- are. They control the armed forces, not Kushner or real estate families or Wall Street. It doesn't matter which individual it is, unless they prove they're breaking from the brass' consensus (like Flynn -- peace with Russia, war against radical Islam, the opposite of the brass' consensus).

Individual actors are just shadowy reflections of the Platonic essence of the interest group they represent. You can comprehend and predict far more when you look at groups. If not enough of Trump's personnel are getting into the government, that's because Trump's group is the American people, one with very weak power in DC. Those groups opposed to his agenda are numerous and powerful.

Prediction: most government positions will get filled by globalists and elitists. Outcome: Trump has trouble getting his supporters into position. You couldn't have predicted that from a free-for-all clash of individual personalities, which would have suggested that the ultimate of personalities -- Trump -- would have imposed his will on the hiring process. Only the group dynamics approach would have predicted the opposite, since Trump has little back-up from interest groups in DC, who are in fact dead set against his hires.

Prediction: Trump supporters will continue to be not represented in govt unless/until Trump rallies his base (his only leverage) to flex their collective muscle. It may sound silly, but imagine 1 million rabid Trump supporters outside the White House every time a major appointment needed to get filled, and they all had posters demanding that the Trumpist candidate get the job, not whoever the elite globalist was. Suddenly, a lot more Trumpists get into the govt.

Institutional analysis also helps to explain why we can't just rely on "Trump hiring the best people" and then delegating to them, a la his role in the Trump Organization.

Unlike his private family business, where he held ultimate control, every major power group wants a piece of the White House pie, and they all send boarding parties to secure a seat at the table. That would be as if Trump took his company public, issued stock, and had to serve on behalf of whatever the stockholders wanted to do.

Unless Trump has his own groups with their own leverage strong enough to resist these boarding parties and their demands, then the hires will not represent the will of Trump or his supporters, but rather those interest groups who sent their boarding parties. That's like a hostile takeover of a publicly traded company, which the Trump Organization has never been.

Taking Mike Cernovich at his word and calling other people gullible? I don't even know where to start. I guess though if you haven't dealt with him firsthand (don't think you're on Twitter, right?) you could be forgiven for not having a grasp on how dishonest the guy is.

The Baked Alaska episode with that Deploraball fiasco is very illustrative of his character as well as the way he operates. Baked Alaska, if you recall, was one of the event's organizers (through the MAGA 3X group) who got blacklisted from the party for tweeting alt-right stuff about the JQ. That's all Cernovich would like you to know about it, at least.

Of course, he would not want you to know that he himself tweeted quite a bit about the JQ, white genocide, Jews did the Holdomor, weev is a personal hero, defending the echo meme, and so forth. After all, he did delete all those. In fact, a keyword search would reveal that he went and scrubbed every single tweet containing the words Jews or Jewish, regardless of context, before he started denouncing BA on the pretext of tweeting about the JQ. Of course, these things are all cached and archived.

He'd probably also rather you not know about the smear piece he put out on Baked Alaska afterward, when it turned out that Baked Alaska was close friends with the non-alt-right Trump grassroots organizers on the West Coast and Baked had both alt-right and ordinary Trump fans defending him.

Cernovich then concocted a hit piece about Baked Alaska being a junkie who was too fucked up to do his work - not only completely unsubstantiated but in fact completely fabricated. I know BA personally, and I have friends who know him face-to-face - the guy does not even touch alcohol, let alone any hard drugs (or weed, despite the name). These allegations were of course made by a guy who uses steroids, advocates experimenting with hallucinogens, and peddles nootropics.

When the comment section on his article was flooded with responses debunking his lies, he deleted the comment section. When he was called out for doing so on Twitter, he hid the article behind an admin-only view of his website, while never recanting any of the lies he made up about BA.

If this were a one-off episode of being a shitbird, it wouldn't matter at all now to anyone who wasn't personally involved.

It's not, though. It's how he operates all the time. Yes, the guy does get some real scoops. I do believe he has a couple sources in the White House. At the same time, he has put out so much fabricated nonsense I'd have a hard time even listing it all.

You would too - because he routinely goes back and erases his claims when reality ends up contradicting them. Cernovich never, ever admits to making a mistake. That would hurt his brand after all - the brand of being 100% truthful.

His every move is calculated based on how it affects his brand, and his calculations are extremely short-term - he will say one thing this week and the complete opposite the next week. One time he started grandstanding about being the only one who'd be willing to stand up for the Boers in South Africa and swearing he'd testify on their behalf to congress if he was called to do so.

He deleted it next week of course and never said another word about them.

One week it's "Richard Spencer is an FBI agent" (which again is something he just pulled out of his ass, I've spoken with Richard Spencer, and a friend I know face-to-face is in charge of his personal security for his college tour - the guy is genuine). Three weeks later it's "Richard Spencer and I are cool now" after he got too much heat for that - all but admitting he made that up in the first place.

So did he have a legitimate scoop this time, or is he fabricating another narrative that will pull the spotlight back onto him, zigging while everyone else is zagging in order to maintain his brand as a contrarian? He is very conscious of the spotlight, after all - it was no coincidence that his "Richard Spencer is controlled opposition" claim came directly after Richard getting himself clocked in the face managed to completely upstage Cernovich's Deploraball (Cerno and Co. were supposed to be the Antifa martyrs, damn Spencer for being the one who actually got hit!)

In short, there is no way to tell when he's being truthful and when he is talking out of his ass. I trust Mike Cernovich about as much as Recep Erdogan.

So we have to be very critical when we're evaluating Cernovich's claims, especially when it sounds like he's telling you something you want to hear.

I don't care about Cernovich's narcissism, long blathering monologues after the main info, or any gay slapfights he's gotten into with Alt-Right people.

Does he have reliable sources on the issues and people discussed? Yes.

Is it "telling us what we want to hear"? Remember you guys were creaming your jeans over the Kushner vs. Bannon feud being real, so if he just wanted to skyrocket in popularity, clicks, and subs, he would've said his sources confirmed that story from the fake news media that you swallowed whole.

Gullible is believing the fake news that "Bannon called Kushner a 'globalist cuck' " -- can't you see how blatantly they're trying to repeat your shibboleths? "Hi fellow redhats..."

You guys got your narrative from the mainstream fake news outlets -- Politico, Daily Beast, etc., were the ones "breaking" the Kushner-Bannon feud story. If you don't trust Cernovich, you definitely should not trust those places. But just because they were listed on Drudge, or found their way onto Twitter, it didn't matter that the writer was from Politico.

Nobody paid any attention to him before he put out the advance warning of the first strike on Syria and got the scoop on Susan Rice, along with other stories confirmed by Eli Lake in Bloomberg, and now by reality. Cernovich broke the Saudi arms deal story on Apr 23, and here we are.

And at any rate, you're deflecting from the main problem, which is that you thought Kushner had enough power and influence to play a key role in the decision to launch airstrikes on Syria, despite him not belonging to any of the powerful interest groups, let alone those which control military policy.

Maybe it was seeing that picture of Kushner in Iraq wearing that vest in the field. As if the Pentagon is going to allow the son-in-law of a President whose policy they despise have any influence over the military.

The same goes for the response to Ivanka crying to her daddy, as though that played a role at all in the decision to launch missiles on Syria. Jesus, she's just a lifestyle-oriented businesswoman! She has ZERO influence on military decisions.

Or on policies in any domain, for that matter. She has absolutely no power in the government.

But to those with the "free-for-all clash of personalities" mindset, she's right up there with Reince Priebus or General Mattis.

I just saw that InfoWars has made shirts that say "I voted for Trump, not Ivanka" -- how paranoid and retarded can you get? They actually know the score on some things, thanks to their reliable sources, but they too swallow the fake news narratives about how powerful Jared & Ivanka are.